A Talkspace therapist texts a client from a plastic bubble in New York.
Photograph: Timothy A Clary//AFP/Getty Images

After a fortnight of Christmas excess, you are now a prime target for the “lifehack” market. Lifehacks promise to improve everything from your waistline to your sex life, usually by feeding you endless data. Recent examples include apps that can clock your sleep patterns and heart rate. This rampant (and often costly) data-monitoring has now spawned the “quantified self” movement, where hackers obsessively inspect every detail of their lives. The trouble is that a lot of what’s on offer is deeply idiotic, with sites like Lifehacker awash with cod-scientific info like Why White Cups Give Your Coffee a More Intense Flavour; and health monitors like Nike’s Fuelband generating huge amounts of data with little guidance on how to use it.

Enter Stupid Hackathon, a New York event that satirises this wave of first-world problem-solving by asking technologists to design something that’s deliberately crap. Its creators are Sam Lavigne and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, two New York artists and technologists. At the most recent gathering, Lavigne was particularly impressed by Tweet Your Food. What was it? “A pair of alligator clips attached to an ice-cream cone. When you take a bite, it completes a circuit and tweets that you took a bite.”

After nine hours of skewering our always-on society, there is, says Winger-Bearskin, “a prize ceremony where you hit a piñata filled with booze and cigarettes. You have to wear the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset as a blindfold.”

Here are their picks of the most pointless, depressing and downright offensive lifehacks on the market …

AWB: It’s a Bluetooth-enabled necklace. If you feel like you’re going to get raped, you just press it and it calls your cellphone. So you can say: “Oh, I’m sorry, I have to take this call.” And then you can escape from your rapist because they’ll be distracted and of course wouldn’t interrupt a phone call to rape you. It’s absolutely amazing and horrifying and hilarious. It’s a really good indication of what’s happening in tech: people who don’t understand something are trying to solve it with something else they don’t understand.

SL: This is a $100 mug that tells you what you just poured into it, via a digital screen. It’s unbelievable. If it was a joke, it would be a really funny joke. But it’s actually real. Someone at Stupid Hackathon made an app that tells you if you’re holding your iPhone or not. Vessyl is not too far from that.

SL: It’s a waterpump that looks like playground equipment you can spin and hop on to. They would install them in impoverished communities in Africa, thinking kids would pump the water while playing. A lot of NGOs got involved, but it was a total disaster because they would remove old hand pumps and put in this new thing without talking to the people there. If children are interested in playing, it works. But the people getting water are often old women, and it’s much harder for them to use. It’s an example of a terrible problem that’s being solved in a way that’s completely terrible – and ineffective.

AWB: A plastic object shaped a bit like an egg with a face. It communicates with “cookies” – little sensors that you fix on to things, allowing the “mum” to tell you where they are via an app. I guess you stick them on your kid’s head or something.

SL: So you can see which of your kids are home.

AWB: Yeah, especially if you have a house with 57 rooms and you just can’t tell if your kids are home. Or you have 57 kids.

AWB: These are basically poles on wheels with iPads on top. They wheel around so that a person teleconferencing can have a physical presence. But that physical presence is just a pole with wheels.

SL: People buy these things for thousands of dollars and remote-control them so they roll into conference rooms when meetings begin.

AWB: Cheryl Woo, a hacker at Stupid Hackathon, pointed out that you don’t even need a telepresence robot – you could just grab a random person and strap an iPad to their face. And then you’d have a telepresence that’s a person.

AWB: This app tells you the neighbourhoods you should avoid while walking home. It ended up just being any neighbourhood that was predominantly African-American or Latino. Sketchiness, according to the Team SketchFactor blog, is “any event that is uncomfortable and out of the ordinary”. With someone of another race!

SL: Its founders are based in Manhattan, of course. But no one is defending it – most people inside the tech industry would say it’s overtly racist. Or maybe they wouldn’t and I’m too optimistic.

AWB: Do we hate human contact and helping people so much that we now outsource even this? We should make a bot that takes Freud’s studies and regurgitates them back at you.

SL: OedipalBot! Which would very slowly move into Oedipal readings of your situation.

AWB: But it is valid to have this therapist, if you need someone to talk to.

SL: Yeah – we don’t want to judge the people using these things. We want to point out how dumb these objects are, but from the point of view of their production rather than their use.

AWB: With this, or the quantified-self movement, it’s all about a sense of feedback. People live in these segmented societies, within cities, and think: “Wow, I always have this thing that’s giving me feedback about myself every few seconds.” It’s solving an existential crisis. It’s a kind of reassurance that you’re alive.